Special Projects Division

Z-603S – Two years on.

Wow – time flies when you’re having fun…. I’ve now had this printer for over two and a half years now, so this is a short update of where things are at, and my perspective on the printer with the benefit of hindsight.

Aside from the new buildplate, and the acrylic top enclosure, one of the other major upgrades I did occurred when my stepper driver broke on the old motherboard. That motherboard had soldered on stepper drivers unfortunately. For a while I had simply scrapped the old motherboard, and had been using a RUMBA board (with replaceable stepper drivers 🙂 externally wired up instead.

I did have this in an enclosure, but even then it wasnt tidy. The hot glue blob in the corner was due to me frying the onboard USB interface chip, so I replaced that component with some mod wires going to an arduino nano. It wasn’t pretty…

However, due to more wires failing, and thinking that I might want to sell this printer in a more normal state at some stage, I eventually decided to contact the manufacturer and paid $200 odd for a new motherboard (green board below), and a new wiring harness for the printer as well.

This was quite worthwhile – the old cheap aluminium cables have been replaced by a much much nicer set of cables, and the motherboard quality also took a big leap in the efficiency of the cooling of the stepper drivers, and in the reliability of the board overall.

OLD MOTHERBOARD

NEW MOTHERBOARD

I also decided to drill some holes in the base of my printer to fit an additional fan, to provide some more powerful active cooling over the stepper drivers.